Jewish Museum Killer Captured

I missed this story over the weekend; I don’t think it got much attention. The guy who murdered three people and critically wounded another at the Jewish Museum in Brussels has been caught:

Mehdi Nemmouche, 29, was arrested at a train station in Marseille on Friday.

Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said the suspect had claimed responsibility for the 24 May attack, which left three people dead and another critically ill.

There doesn’t appear to be any doubt about Nemmouche’s guilt, and, to no one’s surprise, he is a Muslim radical:

Police found Mr Nemmouche had in his possession a Kalashnikov rifle and a handgun believed to have been used in the attack, the Paris prosecutor told a news conference on Sunday.

With the weapons was a white sheet emblazoned with the name of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, a jihadist group fighting in Syria, according to Mr Molins.

Mr Nemmouche was also said to be carrying a camera with a 40-second video showing the two guns and a voice recording, claiming responsibility for the killings and expressing regret that the device had not succeeded in capturing the shooting.

Nemmouche had recently returned to Europe from Syria. This is BBC analysis:

At the time of his arrest, authorities say he had a machine gun wrapped in the flag of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), a group so extreme, with its beheadings and crucifixions, that it has even been disowned by al-Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan.

British government officials have long been warning of the growing risk of young men going off to Syria to join jihadist groups then returning to Britain to carry out attacks at home.

Already the number of Syria-related arrests in the UK this year is greater than for the whole of 2013. An estimated 500+ Britons have gone to Syria to fight, while the number for Europe as a whole may now exceed 3,000.

A small minority have been killed on the battlefield but analysts say that historically the proportion of returning jihadists who go on to commit acts of violence in the country of departure is around one in nine.